Drift Grew 0-70K in 4 Years With This Customer Driven Approach
Here are 4 lessons on how to actually become customer driven
David Cancel founded Drift in 2015, but he developed their core strategy at his previous company called Performable (Acquired by Hubspot). At Performable, he noticed a consistent problem.
He struggled to get his engineering and product team to build new features.
Common responses were it’s “too difficult” or “will take too long.”
So what changed?
Every employee became a customer service rep (handled support calls). Including engineers and product teams.
Suddenly the features that seemed “impossible” were quickly being built.
Because they heard it from 3-4 customers, they figured out a way to fix it.
According to David, that was the lightbulb moment💡
The builders needed to hear it directly from the user (not him).
Feedback came in - customers were surprised to talk directly with the builders They were even happier to see solutions made so quickly Many times fixing the issue on call Here are the 4 lessons David used to build strategy and grow Drift
H/T David's book - Hypergrowth
Lesson 1: Closeness to Customers
In the beginning, every employee had direct touch points with customers. Talking to customers regularly was a priority. For consistency, they made customer-based metrics.
Weekly goals like - contact X people and have Y customer calls/week.
It made sure they tied their goals of being customer driven to measurable actions.
As the company grew, this strategy shifted It turned into weekly user testing and research calls with customers. But the emphasis wasn't to be on calls, it’s spending 6-8 hours a day interacting with customers in some form.
Lesson 2: Out of Office Customer Research
David says the most powerful insights came from interactions with prospects and users.
Surveys are cool, but there’s a gap between what people think they and what they need.
He went to offices to ask questions and observe workflows.
He also met in more casual settings. Conversations over walks, meals, coffees, and group dinners
He looked for:
Potential customers
New customers
Old customers
Unsuccessful customers
Not to pitch Drift, just to have conversations In each situation, Drift just naturally came up in conversation David says the key is to “get them in an environment where their guard is down, and we can start talking about things that matter.”
Lesson 3: Processing Feedback
People focus on the wrong part of feedback.
They focus on the subject of the feedback, not the root cause.
Ex: customers asks, “how can I Integrate product X with Y”
If enough people hear that, they think that's the problem.
This type of problem often disguises the core problem.
David says important feedback isn’t always about the desired result In this example, it’s about customers asking the “how do I”
Maybe steps weren't clear enough? Finding the root causes and gaps in processes, then coming up with solutions is where real value lives.
So at Drift they developed a framework for this - The spotlight framework
A way to categorize issues behind the feedback.To make decisions on next steps
By categorizing feedback, you can turn it into actions.
Actions measured with results.
Lesson 4: Reward Customer Driven Metrics
All teams at Drift are designed to be rewarded only for customer driven metrics.
David found rewarding teams based on specific goals/data points leads to silos.
It also makes them more disconnected from customers.
Here are examples of customer metrics:
Are customers using the product more or less (churn)
Are customer support issues going up or down (customer satisfaction)
Are customers likely to recommend drift (net promoter score)
Specific team metrics are used to work towards these company metrics
Action Items
Here are some steps to help build your customer driven company, product, or team
Meet with 3 customers/week for 1 on 1 feedback
Set up a NPS surrey to get feedback from many customers
Pick customer driven metrics to guide your team
If you liked this breakdown!
Follow me on Twitter @growth_student
Subscribe to this Growth Playbook for more like this
Sources:
https://productled.com/blog/matt-bilotti-drift/
https://mattturck.com/drift/
https://www.drift.com/insider/learn/newsletters/dc/
https://www.hotjar.com/blog/drifts-customer-driven-methodology/